ANN ARBOR—Just how much Arctic permafrost will thaw in the future and how fast heat-trapping carbon dioxide will be released from those warming soils is a topic of lively debate among climate scientists. To answer those questions, scientists need to understand the mechanisms that control the conversion of organic soil carbon into carbon dioxide gas. Until now, researchers believed that bacteria were largely responsible. But in a study scheduled for online publication in Science on Aug. 21, University of Michigan researchers show for the first time that sunlight, not ...

New evidence suggests that giving the Salk inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) to individuals who had already been given the Sabin live-attenuated oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) may improve their immunity to the poliovirus. The results, published in the 22 August issue of the journal Science, could help resolve controversy over vaccine choice as researchers work to hasten elimination of final poliovirus reservoirs in places like Syria and Iraq. "This study revolutionized our understanding of IPV and how to use it in the global eradication effort to ensure children receive ...

VIDEO: In this video, Professors Hay and Dixson talk about their research in Fiji and why marine protected areas might not be enough to help overfished areas recover. Click here for more information. Pacific corals and fish can both smell a bad neighborhood, and use that ability to avoid settling in damaged reefs. Damaged coral reefs emit chemical cues that repulse young coral and fish, discouraging them from settling in the degraded habitat, according to new research. The ...

Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface. At first this was a blip, then a trend, then a puzzle for the climate science community. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring ...

WHAT: National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists have found that Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection in marmosets closely mimics the severe pneumonia experienced by people infected with MERS-CoV, giving scientists the best animal model yet for testing potential treatments. Researchers at NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) used marmosets after predicting in computer models that the animals could be infected with MERS-CoV based on the binding properties of the virus. The same NIAID group in December 2012 ...

Everything about hummingbirds is rapid. An iridescent blur to the human eye, their movements can be captured with clarity only by high-speed video. Slowed down on replay, their wings thrum like helicopter blades as they hover near food. Their hearts beat 20 times a second and their tongues dart 17 times a second to slurp from a feeding station. It takes only three licks of their forked, tube-like tongues to reject water when they expect nectar. They pull their beaks back, shake their heads and spit out the tasteless liquid. They also are not fooled by the sugar substitute ...

A ubiquitous skin fungus linked to dandruff, eczema and other itchy, flaky maladies in humans has now been tracked to even further global reaches—including Hawaiian coral reefs and the extreme environments of arctic soils and deep sea vents. A review in the scientific journal PLOS Pathogens considers the diversity, ecology, and distribution of the fungi of the genus Malassezia in light of new insights gained from screening environmental sequencing datasets from around the world. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa scientist Anthony Amend discovered that members of this ...

Liquid helium, when cooled down nearly to absolute zero, exhibits unusual properties that scientists have struggled to understand: it creeps up walls and flows freely through impossibly small channels, completely lacking viscosity. It becomes a new state of matter – a "superfluid." Now, a large, international team of researchers led by scientists at USC, Stanford and Berkeley has used X-rays from a free-electron laser to peer inside individual droplets of liquid helium, exploring whether this liquid helium retains its superfluid characteristics even at microscopic scales ...

The severe drought gripping the western United States in recent years is changing the landscape well beyond localized effects of water restrictions and browning lawns. Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have now discovered that the growing, broad-scale loss of water is causing the entire western U.S. to rise up like an uncoiled spring. Investigating ground positioning data from GPS stations throughout the west, Scripps researchers Adrian Borsa, Duncan Agnew, and Dan Cayan found that the water shortage is causing an "uplift" effect up to ...

An experiment at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory revealed a well-organized 3-D grid of quantum "tornadoes" inside microscopic droplets of supercooled liquid helium – the first time this formation has been seen at such a tiny scale. The findings by an international research team provide new insight on the strange nanoscale traits of a so-called "superfluid" state of liquid helium. When chilled to extremes, liquid helium behaves according to the rules of quantum mechanics that apply to matter at the smallest scales and defy the laws of classical ...

Scientists have, for the first time, characterized so-called quantum vortices that swirl within tiny droplets of liquid helium. The research, led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of Southern California, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, confirms that helium nanodroplets are in fact the smallest possible superfluidic objects and opens new avenues to study quantum rotation. "The observation of quantum vortices is one of the most clear and unique demonstrations of the quantum properties ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The vast reservoir of carbon stored in Arctic permafrost is gradually being converted to carbon dioxide (CO2) after entering the freshwater system in a process thought to be controlled largely by microbial activity. However, a new study – funded by the National Science Foundation and published this week in the journal Science – concludes that sunlight and not bacteria is the key to triggering the production of CO2 from material released by Arctic soils. The finding is particularly important, scientists say, because climate change could affect when ...

A Finnish-Swedish research group at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, and Karolinska institutet, Stockholm, has developed a novel "man and machine" decision support system for diagnosing malaria infection. This innovative diagnostic aid was described in PLOS One scientific journal today, 21 August. The method is based on computer vision algorithms similar to those used in facial recognition systems combined with visualization of only the diagnostically most relevant areas. Tablet computers can be utilized in viewing the images. In ...

An international research team including DESY scientists has observed tiny quantum vortices in cold droplets of liquid helium. The team reports in the journal Science that the exotic vortices arrange themselves as densely packed lattices inside the nanodroplets. It is the first time that the quantum vortices, which have already been observed in larger samples of what is known as superfluid helium, have been detected in nanodroplets. "The experiment has exceeded our best expectations," says Andrey Vilesov of the University of Southern California, one of the experiment's ...

Bacteria growing in near darkness use a previously unknown process for harvesting energy and producing oxygen from sunlight, a research team led by a Penn State University scientist has discovered. The discovery lays the foundation for further research aimed at improving plant growth, harvesting energy from the Sun, and understanding dense blooms like those now occurring on Lake Erie and other lakes worldwide. A paper describing the discovery will be published in the Science Express edition of the journal Science on 21 August 2014. "We have shown that some cyanobacteria, ...

SAN FRANCISCO – Aug. 21, 2014 – Researchers in the United Kingdom have demonstrated that advanced DNA testing for congenital cataracts can quickly and accurately diagnose a number of rare diseases marked by childhood blindness, according to a study published online today in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Using a single test, doctors were able to tailor care specifically to a child's condition based on their mutations reducing the time and money spent on diagnosis and enabling earlier treatment and genetic counseling. Each year, ...

LOS ANGELES — New research led by the University of Southern California (USC) Eye Institute, part of Keck Medicine of USC, shows for the first time that Native American ancestry is a significant risk factor for vision-threatening diabetic retinopathy among Latinos with Type 2 diabetes. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in working-age adults in the United States, affecting more than 4 million Americans age 40 and older. The research was published online today in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, the peer-reviewed academic journal of The ...

Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have developed a new process which will greatly simplify the process of sorting plastics in recycling plants. The method enables automated identification of polymers, facilitating rapid separation of plastics for re-use. A team of researchers led by Professor Heinz Langhals of LMU's Department of Chemistry has taken a significant step which promises to markedly expedite the recycling of plastic waste. They have developed a technique which provides for automated recognition of their polymer constituents, thus ...

The American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) announces the immediate release of Care of the Critically Ill and Injured During Pandemics and Disasters: CHEST Consensus Statement today in the Online First section of the journal CHEST while the global health-care community cares for patients with the Ebola virus. The consensus statement aims to guide ethical decision-making, coordination of care, resource conservation, and research in crises. The statement was developed by over 100 clinicians and experts representing a broad variety and scope of clinical fields from more ...

Princeton University researchers have developed a way to use a laser to measure people's blood sugar, and, with more work to shrink the laser system to a portable size, the technique could allow diabetics to check their condition without pricking themselves to draw blood. "We are working hard to turn engineering solutions into useful tools for people to use in their daily lives," said Claire Gmachl, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and the project's senior researcher. "With this work we hope to improve the lives of many diabetes sufferers who depend ...

To sexually objectify a woman is to focus on her body in terms of how it can provide sexual pleasure rather than viewing her as a complete human being with thoughts and feelings. While objectification has long been considered a problem in the media, how does it affect individual romantic relationships? New research published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, a SAGE journal, finds that more objectification of a female partner's body is related to higher incidents of sexual pressure and coercion. Researchers Laura R. Ramsey and Tiffany Hoyt surveyed 119 males and 162 females ...

Many primary care physicians in rural communities do not routinely screen women for intimate partner violence (IPV), according to Penn State medical and public health researchers. Rural women who are exposed to such violence have limited resources if they seek help. "Rural health care providers are uniquely positioned to help women," said Jennifer S. McCall-Hosenfeld, a primary care physician and assistant professor of medicine and public health sciences, Penn State College of Medicine. "However, in rural settings, it might be even more important for physicians to step ...

Algae might seem easy to ignore, but they are the ultimate source of all organic matter that marine animals depend upon. Humans are increasingly dependent on algae, too, to suck up climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sink it to the bottom of the ocean. Now, by using a combination of satellite imagery and laboratory experiments, researchers have evidence showing that viruses infecting those algae are driving the life-and-death dynamics of the algae's blooms, even when all else stays essentially the same, and this has important implications for our climate. According ...

Johns Hopkins stem cell biologists have found a way to reprogram a patient's skin cells into cells that mimic and display many biological features of a rare genetic disorder called familial dysautonomia. The process requires growing the skin cells in a bath of proteins and chemical additives while turning on a gene to produce neural crest cells, which give rise to several adult cell types. The researchers say their work substantially expedites the creation of neural crest cells from any patient with a neural crest-related disorder, a tool that lets physicians and scientists ...

HOUSTON – (Aug. 21, 2014) – An international scientific collaboration led by Baylor College of Medicine has revealed clues about genetic alterations that may contribute to a rare form of kidney cancer, providing new insights not only into this rare cancer but other types as well. The collaboration, a project of the National Institutes of Health's Cancer Genome Atlas initiative, completed the sequence of chromophobe renal cell carcinoma and published the results today in the journal Cancer Cell. "The Cancer Genome Atlas is a federally funded national effort that has ...